January 2010 Home Accent

home accent

L i v i n g w i t h s t y L e i n s k a g i t c o u n t y

January 2010

INSIDE

‘FROM UGLY DUCKLINGS TO BEAUTIFUL SWANS’Anacortes house ‘flipper’ transforms sad homesArchitectural design awardsGuemes Island cabins, Skagit Valley Medical Center honored

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f e a t u r e s

the a r t o f f aux pa i n t i ngAnacortes woman gives makeovers to worn houses with the intent of flipping them

2

Ea t i ng l i f e s t y l e sPleasing the meatless and heatless eaters in your life 16

W ELCOME

2 home accent / January 2010 January 10, 2010 published by the Skagit Valley Herald

Goldina Gonska’s living room features a brocade couch with throw pillows, a burgundy marble fireplace and Gonska’s cross collection.

An artist’s ‘H ouses are my canvases,” Goldina Gon-

ska said. “Just as an artist has no use for a painting after it is done, I have no use

for a house once I’ve redecorated it.”Gonska “flips” houses. “I buy really sad hous-

es that are crying out for TLC,” she explained, “and I transform them from ugly ducklings to beautiful swans.” Her home in Anacortes’ Skyline neighborhood is the 13th house she’s purchased with the intent of flipping.

Gonska studied interior design in Los Ange-les, where she continued to live for 35 years. She balanced family life with her interior-decorating business and flipping houses, and she learned

S t o r y b y Te r u L u n d s t e n v P h o t o g r a p h y b y F r a n k V a r g a

Continued on Page 3

Infused with ambiance, panache

the craft of faux painting.Gonska came to the Northwest in 1992, when

she bought and flipped a house in Sammamish. She purchased her Skyline home in early 2005. “What attracted me to it was that it was in really bad condi-tion,” she said, “but it had good bones and was in a good neighborhood.”

The only homes Gonska buys are ones she can fix up herself. She never hires an architect, builder or landscaper. “I won’t do construction, just cosmetics,” she said.

Six renters occupied her Anacortes house before she purchased it. “It was dirty, and it had old 1970s fixtures and colors,” Gonska said. The colors dated further back than 1992, when the house was originally built. “The average person is a bit behind the trends, but it was only paint,” she said.

published by the Skagit Valley Herald January 10, 2010 home accent / January 2010 3

The sandstone-colored walls in the living room are faux stone blocks.

For the holidays, Gonska placed Christmas trees in every room.

Continued on Page 4

Continued from Page 2

The first thing Gonska did was to paint every room beige, giving the house a cleaner look. Over time, she added faux painting to most of the upstairs rooms. “I just love faux painting because that’s what personalizes a house,” she said. “It’s that special touch, like jewelry on a person.”

The sage green house is not eye-catching from the street. “You have to fit into your neigh-borhood. Otherwise, it’s not good for resale,” Gonska said. The house also looks smaller than it is, and only the red front door gives a clue to the warm ambi-ance inside.

The house was originally built for two families. The top floor is on the street level and the lower floor is basically a daylight base-ment. There are two bedrooms on the top floor, four smaller

bedrooms on the lower floor and kitchens on both floors. The home’s square footage is 3,458, split almost equally between floors.

Gonska has focused her efforts on the top floor, where she lives. She uses the lower floor primar-ily for storage.

S e t t i n g a t h e m eIn the entryway, the dove

gray walls have a faux linen fin-ish and faint painted-on silver leaf “seams” — a faux-painting technique called “paneling.” A Japanese secretariat sits against one wall; a mahogany leaf panel hangs on the facing wall.

A magnificent Christmas tree, resplendent in red and gold, stands tall just beyond the entrance. “This year’s theme is Asian,” said Gonska, pointing to the top adorned with a bouquet

of several large open fans. She explained that only one-third of the ornaments are Asian, but that is enough to establish the theme.

“Last year’s theme was Moroc-can,” she continued. “There were lots of feathers — I’m always over the top!” Gonska is partial to patterns and objects from Asia and Africa, especially Morocco, even though she has never been to those places.

The kitchen and breakfast room, basically one room, lie beyond the Christmas tree. Most walls are khaki colored, finished to look like suede. Since the room has a vaulted ceiling, Gon-ska again employed the panel-ing technique. “It brings the eye down, making the room cozier,” she said.

Other walls are a terra cotta color, finished to look like croco-


The informal dining room highlights some of Gonska’s trademarks: the area rug, the leopard-print chair, the paneling technique.

Faux painting ‘personalizes a house.’

Continued on Page 5


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Gonska “repurposes’’ objects, pairing items that don’t normally belong together.

dile skin, an effect she invented. This scaly look is achieved by scraping with a toothed rubber tool.

As she did elsewhere in the house, Gonska mixed all her own colors.

Gonska likes jungle animal prints, and they appear throughout the house, providing continuity. She has leopard-print dishes and stemware, and her little, blind, three-legged dog sleeps under a leopard-print blanket on his doggie bed.

D e l i g h t i n g i n d e t a i l sThroughout the house, Gonska “repurposes”

objects, meaning she uses items in ways they weren’t originally meant to be used or pairs things that don’t normally belong together. “It’s the wow factor in my accessories,” she said.

In the breakfast room, an ornate Chinese bamboo birdcage functions as a nightlight, and a leopard-print vase with an elegant mesh food tent on top of it combine to create an unusual new object.

Continued on Page 6


Gonska did not replace the original white kitchen appli-ances, oak cabinets, or the beige Formica countertop. “It’s a clean palette,” she said. “My accessories show up better.” Granite countertops are popu-lar now, but Gonska thinks their patterns are too busy. “Sometimes it’s best not to go with the flow of what every-one’s doing,” she said.

High on the wall above the stove hangs the skull of a steer that Gonska bought at a garage sale for one dollar. It was cracked white ceramic bisque. She repaired the cracks and painted it with three metallic glazes.

Gonska also faux finishes furniture; she especially enjoys working on chairs. She bought a simple wooden chair for a dol-lar at another garage sale and painted it in African designs. The chair now livens up a cor-ner of the breakfast room.

Gonska’s cross collection is displayed in the living room. “You should have an acces-sory you love in every room,” she said. Though she is not a churchgoer, she loves the sym-bol of the cross. “It makes me feel peaceful,” she said.

The sandstone-colored walls are faux stone blocks, with faux bricks around the front window. Short pile Berber wall-to-wall neutral-colored carpet and a dynamic area rug cover the floor. “Area rugs ground the furniture and vignettes,” Gonska said. “They pull the eye down.”


LEFT: High above the stove hangs the skull of a steer.

BELOW: The walls in the formal dining room are dark red with a faux leather finish, the ceiling gold leaf, applied to look like clouds, with a hanging bowl of swimming goldfish.

Continued on Page 7


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The wall-to-wall carpet stretches throughout most of the house, with an area rug in each room. Only the entry-way and kitchen differ, sporting oak floors.

Living room furniture includes a brocade couch with lots of throw pillows, a Japanese oval floor screen with Fu dogs (guardian symbols) at its feet, a four-paneled Chinese screen high atop a cherrywood bookcase, a bur-gundy marble fireplace with a floating mantel and an abstract tulip lamp.

The dining room is small, intimate and red — a color said to stimulate the appetite. The walls are dark red with a faux leather finish. The ceiling is gold leaf applied to look like clouds, with a bowl filled with swimming gold-fish (meant to contain floating candles) hanging above the elaborately set table for six.

Shiny enamel round “chargers,” or lightweight plate holders, are set at each place. Matching square chargers are repurposed in a china cabinet, propped up behind


The informal dining room is adjacent to the kitchen.

“You should have an accessory you love in every room.”

Goldina Gonska, house flipper

Continued on Page 8


Gonska’s hurricane lamp collection to form a dra-matic, reflective background. “People look luscious in this room,” Gonska said.

B l e n d i n g s t y l e a n d p u r p o s e

The hall leading toward the bedrooms is lined with several Chinese mother-of-pearl panels that depict birds and flowers. These walls, too, are faux paneled — “to get that gallery look,” Gonska said. “It gives more presence to artwork.”

Off the hallway, a stairway leads down to the daylight basement. A door opens into the laundry room, and an opposite door opens into the powder room. The bronze-colored walls of the powder room are finished to look like elephant skin, an effect achieved by applying tissue paper, which shrinks and wrinkles as it dries.

Two different paint rollers were used on the ceiling, one covered with cheesecloth, to create a cane effect. A gauzy dark red decorative shower curtain loosely drapes over the functional one in a leop-ard print.


The hall leading toward the bedrooms is lined with Chinese mother-of-pearl panels that depict birds and flowers.

Continued on Page 9


The bedrooms are at the end of the hall. One is used as the TV room, which is currently full of unsold Christmas items from Gonska’s recent in-house bazaar.

(Acquiring and shedding accessories is a continual pro-cess for her.)

There is no faux painting in either bed-room. Walls in both are cela-don green, a peaceful color named for an ancient style of Chinese ceramics.

In Gonska’s bedroom,

with adjoining bathroom, the bed is covered with a leopard-print duvet and zebra-print throw pil-lows. The repurposed headboard pairs a bamboo floor screen with a red bamboo medallion.

The bench at the foot of the bed and a stiletto chair are


LEFT: Gonska mixes her own paint colors.

BELOW: Gonska faux finishes furniture, and especially enjoys working on chairs.

Gonska is partial to patterns and objects from Asia and Africa.


Continued on Page 10

upholstered in leopard prints.Accents include palm fronds in a tall

vase, a twisting rectangular lamp, a Thai mask of Buddha and copper-painted branches decorated with Christmas orna-ments, in keeping with Gonska’s practice of having some kind of Christmas tree in every room.

Gonska’s yard is designated a Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary by the state Depart-ment of Fish and Wildlife. In back, a grace-ful iron gazebo houses a round patio table, a matching miniature gazebo at its center.

In front, birds chirp and flitter from a bank of conifers to a water bubbler and feeder, cheering up the wintry yard. An ornamental weeping cherry tree stands near the front door, its canopy of now-bare branches already covered with the promise of tiny buds.


The stiletto chair in the master bedroom is upholstered in leopard prints.

The bronze-colored walls of the powder room are finished to look like elephant skin, an effect achieved by applying tissue paper, which shrinks and wrinkles as it dries.


I t is during the holiday season when we think most of champagne. Wine distributors and retailers know

their customers will buy more sparkling wine between November and January than any other time of the year.

The reason for the surge in sales is obvious. We associate the holidays with celebration — the good times greeted by laughs, friendship and hope. What better way to embrace 2010 than by opening a bottle of champagne with friends or family this month?

And why won’t a bottle of premium cabernet sauvignon do? It’s the bub-bles, of course.

Champagne undergoes a second-ary fermentation — an unavoidable byproduct of Champagne’s cold climate where, in the old days, fermentation would resume when the spring weather warmed. The accident created an effer-vescence in the bottle. These bubbles bursting to get out creates hundreds of pounds of pressure, which is obvious to any klutz who fumbles an uncorking.

Although the French monks who first made champagne saw the bubbles as an embarrassing flaw, the world delighted as they danced in the mouth. But beware — those bubbles speed alcohol into the blood stream, so you might keep an eye on your giddy guest.

We like to greet our wintertime guests with champagne because it sets an elegant tone to our gathering and most people so rarely have it. Although champagne can be matched with many foods, it shines best as an aperitif. One or two glasses — accompanied by smoked salmon, shrimp or caviar — is enough to get your event off to a spir-ited start.

California is making some excel-lent sparkling wine and often at prices equal to champagne — a name reserved for sparkling wines that come from France’s Champagne region. Champagne may have the cachet, but we have found sparkling wine to be as luxurious as champagne.

Recommendationsm Nicolas Feuillatte (France). A

perennial favorite of ours, Feuillatte remains a great value in champagnes.

Working with 5,000 grow-ers, it makes a lot of wine that is easy to find in the market. We like the brut rose, a cop-per-colored cuvee that is 60 percent pinot noir. It has gener-

ous raspberry and strawberry flavors and good mouthfeel. Feuillatte’s brut reserve — a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier — is an equally good champagne if rose isn’t your thing.m Veuve Clicquot. This producer’s

yellow label is one of the easiest cham-pagnes to find. For less than $50, it delivers a lot of pure fruit in the classic French style. We love Grande Dame, an expensive luxurious cuvee. But across the board, Veuve Clicquot makes excel-lent champagne.m Schramsberg (California). Hands

down, Schramsberg is probably the best sparkling wine producer in Cali-fornia and relatively easy to find. The 2006 blanc de noir ($40) delivers opu-lent strawberry and citrus flavors with good toast and hints of spiced orange and cinnamon. Schramsberg 2006 blanc de blancs ($36) is made entirely of chardonnay and has more elegance than the forward blanc de noir. Apple and tropical fruit dominate the flavor profile. If you can find one of the 200 bottles of luxurious J. Schram ($65), it will be one of your most enjoy-able wine experiences of the year. It’s expensive but great.m J Cuvee. The Cuvee 20 Russian

River Valley brut ($20) is more than a stunning label. It has simple but gener-ous grapefruit flavors and honeysuckle aromas. It’s a good value.m Mumm Napa. Perhaps this pro-

ducer isn’t as elegant as other Cali-fornia sparkling wine producers, but it delivers good fruit for the money. Check out the Mumm Napa Cuvee M ($20).

m Taittinger. This prolific and his-toric French producer makes excellent champagne from largely chardonnay grapes. At the top is its luxurious Com-tes de Champagne. The reasonably priced Brut La Francaise ($45) is fresh on the palate with the elegance that comes with chardonnay-dominated champagnes. It offers pear and peach notes with bread-like aromas. We also liked the chardonnay-pinot noir blend Taittinger Prelude Grand Crus NV ($100). Intense bread, yeasty nose with good fruit and balance will delight drinkers’ tastebuds. m Perrier-Jouet. Famous for its flow-

er label, this champagne house founded in 1811 — “recent” by champagne stan-dards — makes consistently reliable wine. We like the rose and grand brut.

Tom Marquardt and Patrick Darr have visited vineyards all over the world and have been writing a wine column for 20 years. Courtesy of Relish Magazine.

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he Skagit Valley Medical Center in Mount Vernon, a summer house and guest cab-ins on Guemes Island, and a modernist house on Chuckanut Ridge were among the struc-tures honored for their beauty and functionality at the 20th annual Architectural Design Awards sponsored by the Northwest Washington chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The awards were present-ed Dec. 7 at McIntyre Hall in Mount Vernon. NWAIA mem-bers and affiliates serve Skagit, Whatcom, San Juan and Island counties. Members must be registered architects, and asso-ciate members must be work-ing toward registration.

Jerry Ernst, Ed Weinstein and

T


The Guemes Island sleepInG cabIns were honored for being “a real union of structure and land.”

The Guemes Island summer house, designed by HKP Architects of Mount Vernon, was praised for its “very

disciplined composition with nothing out of place.”

Story by

Gordon Weeks

Photographs

courtesy of the northWest WashinGton chapter of the american institute of architects

accoladesin architecture

Continued on

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William Dietrich judged the contest entries. Ernst is an architect and certi-fied planner with more than 40 years of experience in architecture, physical planning and urban design. Weinstein is an architect with more than 30 years of experience in the Puget Sound region. A resident of Fidalgo Island, Dietrich is an author, journalist and university professor who teaches environmental journalism at Western Washington Uni-versity.

The Guemes Island sleeping cabins received the Honor Award. They were dubbed an “outstanding example of architecture worthy of study by the entire

profession.” The cabins also received the Glen Hunt Award, which “recognizes seamless integration between architec-ture and landscape.” The two cabins were created by the Seattle-based firm Bos-worth Hoedemaker LLC.

The master cabin and the guest cabin are located behind the main house on the Guemes compound’s lawn. The jury called it a “very appropriate compound. The three elements create a place. The meadow is the fourth element. ... The Guemes sleeping complex was a particu-larly effective rehabilitation of a logged-over parcel into a wood-and-meadow landscape that unites the cabins while


The designers of the ChuCkanut Ridge house, according to the judges, “took the challenges of a difficult site and treated them as opportunities.”

notaBLe

Continued on Page 15



NW structures

Skagit Valley Medical center in Mount Vernon won the People’s Choice Award after receiving the most votes cast online.

also giving them privacy. A real union of structure and land.”

The cabins’ architect, Thomas L. Bosworth, served as princi-pal in charge along with Steve Hoedemaker. Bryan Chilcote worked with Boswoth and Hoedemaker on the project’s design. Swenson Say Faget served as consultant, Malgo-sia Mazurkiewicz as structural engineer and Garen Wilkens as builder.

The Guemes Island summer house, designed by HKP Archi-tects of Mount Vernon, won a Merit Award as “an outstanding example worthy of study on a regional basis.”

The judges praised the house for its “very disciplined compo-sition with nothing out of place. The Guemes summer house was appealing in its logical simplic-ity. ... It was the most inviting

house, for casual living, that we reviewed.”

David Hall was the principal in charge and the project design-er. He paired with Adair Orr as the design team. West Sound Engineers were the consultants, and the builder was Indigo Con-struction.

The other Merit Award win-ner is a Chuckanut Ridge house in Skagit County designed by Prentiss Architects of Seattle. The jury described it as the “most conceptually insistent project that we have seen.”

The judges lauded the house for its “very clear circulation network and zoning” and noted that the structure is “beautifully detailed in an abstract modern-ist manner that is an appro-priate background/container for the owner’s Asian art. The Chuckanut Ridge house took the challenges of a difficult site and treated them as opportu-

nities. The house takes on the linear form of its rocky ridge while capitalizing on views and capturing its own water and electricity. It has a sophisticated elegance.”

Geoff Prentiss was the archi-tect and principal in charge. Dan Wickline was the project design-er, and Eric Nebel joined him on the design team. The builder was Emerald Builder, and Perbix Bykonen was the consultant.

The People’s Choice Award — given to the structure that received the most online votes — goes to the Skagit Valley Medical Center in Mount Ver-non. It was designed and built by Fisher & Sons Inc. of Burling-ton. Shepard Cutler is the archi-tect, and the design team was Larry Dodge, Michelle Ander-son and William Langley. The consultants were Peterson, Stre-hle, Martinson Inc. and Skyline Electric, CPI.


TO SUIT THE CHEF


G iven the fervor over vegetarianism, you’d think it’s something

new. It’s not. It’s a tenant of Hinduism and Buddhism, and past advocates of a plant-based diet range from Pythagoras to Tolstoy to Hitler. Reasons to become a vegetarian include health and ethics, and proponents tell us that it needn’t be an all or nothing proposition. If you aspire to be one — or to feed one — here are some permutations.

Vegetarian: Abstains from animal flesh.

Lactarian, lacto-vegetar-ian: Dairy, yes. Eggs, no.

Ovo-vegetarian: Eggs, yes. Dairy, no.

Ovolactarian, ovo-lacto-vegetarian: Eats eggs and dairy but no meat. This approach offers the simplest way to assure adequate con-sumption of protein without eating meat.

Pescetarian: Land animals are off the menu, but fish is fine.

Vegan: Abstains from all animal products, including

eggs and dairy, as well as less obvious offenders like honey and gelatin. Serious vegans don’t wear wool, silk or leather and check tooth-paste labels to avoid calcium derived from animal bones.

Fruitarian: Eats only fruit. Reported benefits include spiritual awareness, freedom from cowardice and pleasant body odor.

Flexitarian: Strives to eat mostly plants but occasionally eats meat or fish.

Semitarian: A flexitarian with rules, generally a sched-ule for when meat can be eaten. Cookbook author and food writer Mark Bittman, for example, is a “vegan until dinner,” when all bets are off.

Raw foodist: In the belief that cooking kills nutrients, raw foodists avoid meals heated above 115F. He or she might be vegetarian; some raw foodies frequent sushi bars. Usually passionate about juicing and sprouting, raw foodists “bake” through dehydration. Reported ben-efits include weight loss and heightened energy.

A cor nucop ia OF EATERS

Mark Boughton / relish Magazine

Chilequiles Verde recipe by Crescent DragonwagonCooking spray 2 cups prepared salsa, divided 8 to 10 (6-inch) stale corn tortillas,

torn in quarters 1 (8-ounce) package Neufchatel

cheese 2 eggs 3 tablespoons cornstarch 8 ounces extra-firm, water-packed

tofu, crumbled 1 1/2 to 2 cups lightly steamed

fresh vegetables (zucchini sliced in 1/4-inch rounds;

string beans sliced in 1/2-inch lengths; chopped, cooked Swiss chard)

1 cup fresh or frozen corn kernels 1 (10-ounce) can green chile sauce 4 ounces shredded sharp cheddar or

Monterey jack cheese 1. Preheat oven to 350F. 2. spray a 15-by-10-inch baking dish

with cooking spray. spread about 3/4 cup salsa over the bottom of pan. scat-ter one-third of the tortillas on top.

3. Place 1/2 cup salsa, neufchatel, eggs and cornstarch in the bowl of a food processor. Process until smooth. stir in crumbled tofu.

4. spoon half the neufchatel mixture over tortillas. scatter vegetables and corn on top. Drizzle with remaining 3/4 cup salsa, and top with half the remain-ing tortillas. Cover with remaining neuf-chatel mixture. top with remaining torti-llas. spoon green chile sauce over top.

5. Bake, covered, 40 minutes. remove cover; sprinkle with shredded cheese. increase heat to 375F; bake 10 to 12 minutes, until cheese is melted and slightly browned. serves 8.

Per serving: 322 calories, 15g fat, 90mg cholesterol, 16g protein, 32g carbohydrates, 3g fiber, 660mg sodium.

By JO MaRShaLL w rel ish Magazine Contr ibutor

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